Ireland is still suffering from the violence caused by Britain's decision 200 years ago to block the gradualist route to Home Rule, the former Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, has said.
However, Dr Fitzgerald said last night that had the Act of Union not been passed at the beginning of the 19th century, the years that followed would have been much more violent.
He told a seminar on the act, which began yesterday in Newman House in Dublin, that the alternative would have been the survival of the Anglican Irish parliament into the 19th century which would have been "no picnic" and would have led to violence on "a larger scale". The seminar, which will continue through the weekend, is jointly organised by the British Irish Association (BIA) and the Institute for British Irish Studies (IBIS).
Dr FitzGerald told his audience that he didn't wish to make a case for the Act of Union, rather he wanted to warn "of the dangers of simplified historical assumptions". The situation in Ireland at the time was "so inherently unstable that one way or the other it was bound to end in tears.
". . . Looking back over our history, I believe the truth is that once the Reformation had failed to take among the indigenous Irish population, Ireland could never in the longer term, ultimately, be accommodated comfortably in the British context. The decline of the Irish language "may have eliminated one cultural division between the settlers and the indigenous population, but as we've recently seen in Yugoslavia even when no language barrier exists, religious differences have the potential to create deeper and more bitter cultural and thus political divisions even than language".
Dr FitzGerald said if independence for this State had come much later than it did, it would have been seriously detrimental to the Irish people. "Irish independence could not I believe have been further postponed without seriously prejudicing the long-term interests of the Irish people.
". . . In retrospect we can see any attempt at postponement would have uncomfortably foreshortened the new Irish State's finding its feet within a Europe of sovereign states.
". . . The new State needed at least 40 years of untrammelled political independence in which to make its own mistakes, which were many, and to learn how to accommodate itself to the outside world."
The fact that the interests of this State within the European Union are very different from those of Britain meant the Irish "most clearly required that they be represented there in their own right".
Since joining the European Union Ireland had developed a "new, much healthier, relaxed and genuinely warm relationship with the neighbouring island". The director of the IBIS, Dr John Coakley, said everyone would learn today whether the Belfast Agreement "had been given a new lease of life or whether the parties and Government must begin again in pursuit of a settlement.
"Whatever the outcome, there will continue to be a need for the academic community to address the issue of intense political conflict. . . The issues may be fascinating, but the life circumstances, sometimes even the very lives, of real people are at stake."
He said that academics "may choose to aim for political neutrality but not for austere detachment from the conflicts that surround us". The chairman of the BIA, Sir David Goodall, said both Britain and Ireland "had a lot to be greatful for" from Dr FitzGerald who had "given his political life to promoting a healthier relationship between Britain in Ireland."
The BIA was founded in 1972 as an educational charity with the aim of promoting "better relations within and between Great Britain and Ireland". The Institute for British Irish Studies was founded last year and "seeks to promote and conduct academic research on relations between the two islands".
The conference continues today and tomorrow with contributions from Irish and British academics.
roddyosullivan@ireland.com
Web link: www.ucd.ie/(tilde)ibis
